May 25, 2011

At his first courtroom appearance shortly after the shootings, Mr. Loughner had his head shaved clean and stood absolutely erect. On Wednesday, his hair was long and sticking out in all directions, he had a scraggly beard and he slumped during the proceedings like an old man. He put his head in his hands for some time just before his outburst, which he shouted at full throttle as the judge was talking.

129 comments:

Remember when our leftist overlords mysteriously and quickly coalesced over the idea that we must all immediately stop political criticism because this deranged nutball shot some people including a politician? Remember that?

What happened with that? Did this particular nutball turn out not to be sufficiently against the crushing federal debt?

I find the whole incompetent to stand trail a farce. Either the defendant committed the act, or not. If so found, then punish, if not, release. Mental state should be irrelevant. I am not a lawyer which explains my ruthlessness.

It is a part of our Judeo-Christian heritage to see an insane/demonized man as not in control of his own mind, and therefore punishing him would have no effect on the real man until he recovers. The result is that we lock them up to protect them and others. Shooting them first at arrest would be cheaper.

It was all Palin's fault. Then the guy turns out to be a garden-variety crazy leftist.

Democrats can't catch a break. Also -- and I say this as someone who doesn't want President Sarah Palin -- the left sure does expend vast amounts of energy trying any way they can to denigrate Palin. So very Nixonesque (cf., McGovern).

Considering my interest in NewAge, he seems as normal as the next guy. Think about it: He was a weirdo, for how many years, before he did something that finally made it clear he was nuts? Before that, he was just "Jared" to most people, a good ol' Bush-hating, Buddha-worshiping, reader of Karl Marx with a shrine out back. Nothing weird there, as far as most people are concerned - never mind that Bush was right, Buddha was a fruitcake, and Karl Marx a liar. We must be open-minded.

I see NewAge like a large pretty rock, with lots of fascinating swirly patterns on it, but when you lift it up and look underneath, rather than just finding worms and bugs running for cover, you literally are looking into Hell - and almost everyone you know is in there. That's the Boomer's "spiritual" legacy to the rest of us, as surely as this financial crisis is our economic inheritance from them - which they'd prefer to make worse before they even hand it over. This poor asshole, Jared, is just another victim of their policies and "ideas" who probably could've got help (and, thus, spared the Giffirds family) if the Boomer ethos - and not just Jared Lee Loughner - were discredited sooner.

Now - go celebrate Oprah and keep the nightmare going a little longer.

This is the correct decision. He is, by all accounts, severely mentally ill, and no other explanation is necessary for his actions. Such is life sometimes.

5/25/11 3:36 PM"

This isn't about his 'actions' in shooting people. It's about his ability to aid his defense and understand the charges.

It's a very very very easy standard for even really disturbed people to pass. And I think reading his internet screeds shows he probably has the ability to aid his defense and definitely has the ability to understand the consequences for his charges (that he sought to avoid, after all).

No, it's not so clear to me.

Your standard means that we can't convict people of the most awful crimes. That's absurd.

The fact that he's choosing not to aid his defense is that the same as a fundamental inability. He knows he's caught, with no good defense, so he's probably playing crazy... oddly enough, this is the best way to help his case that exists.

Yeah, well, Laurie Dann was just a zany, kooky gal who liked to ride elevators (in the Towers) at one time. That's the problem. You see lots of crazy folks talking to themselves (or talking to bus stops and fire hydrants) and you think, OK, doesn't seem to be hurting anyone, I'll just walk by, but faster. The transitions that folks who are bi-polar, schizophrenic or therwise impaired, can make, are amazing and unpredictable.

What does this imply about the Gun boutique owner/employees who sold the psychotic.. glocks?? Wait---f**k this is Althouse, like one big Zona party house full of semi-carrying Jareds. Inference a bit beyond 'em.

The following is from a post by Dr. Sanity at the time of the shooting:

Schizophrenia is a real physiological illness that usually begins in late adolescence, early adulthood; and it is like a youthful dementia; slowly tearing down the neural pathways in the brain and causing deteriorating cognitive functioning. The paranoia comes about as the person suffering from the disease tries to make sense of all the irrational, distorted and bewildering perceptions that their malfunctioning brain is attempting to interpret.

Paranoid schizophrenics almost always have bizarre political and/or religious agendas. Their delusions almost always have relevance to the current political situation and context within which they live. I can give you hundreds of examples from my personal experience treating them: the CIA or other "secret" agencies are tapping into their minds; the "government" (and I have seen U.S., British, and multiple other governments implicated depending on the national origins of the individual in question) is out to destroy them because they know something they should not; they alone understand the urgency of the threat. When the Patty Hearst kidnapping occurred decades ago, almost all the schizophrenics I saw had delusions related to Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. More recently, a paranoid schizophrenic that I evaluated thought that President Bush practiced dark magic to force people into 'volunteering' for the military and that this was why no military draft was needed to get recruits to go to Iraq.

The paranoid person himself is always at the center of some vast conspiracy that only he can see. He is special because of it--and this specialness likely compensates for whatever awareness he might have of his deterioring intellectual and social functioning. As that functioning gets more chaotic and dysfunctional, the paranoid gets even more desperate to explain what is happening to him and his world, and the delusions become more and more complex and eventually may have no connection at all to anything in the real world.

In my career as a psychiatrist I have encountered many psychotic and schizophrenic individuals with religious and anti-religious delusions.

Isn't there a country that has a verdict of "guilty, but insane"? Couldn't that apply here?

I can't help but recall the thread a couple of days back concerning psychological analysis from a distance. Of course, we have an official diagnosis, but did we a) need one or b)hesitate before deciding his insane state?

Some things are glaringly obvious, and perhaps--to a trained professional--it IS possible to analyze from afar.

or........Loughner, associated with right-wing extremists in AZ (ie, anti-immigration zealots also hated Ms Giffords, and the judge JL shot) may have known a bit too much. Unbalanced, twisted,deviant--yes, but mostly coherent in his few last rants. So he enacts the horrible "payback" to Ms Giffords and the "liberals" --perhaps following orders, or with unknowns involved (ie, those who helped with him getting his weapons). Inside the AZ/Fed machine, the authorities finally realize they've got a lot to lose if Jared's allowed to testify freely. So...while's inside--the Feds mix in some bad dope--tainted thorazine, whatever--with his chow. And...presto chango--he's turned into a drooling psychopath who no longer poses any danger to the AZ right-wing militias.

I suspect he is faking it, but what he did is so depraved and senseless you cannnot dismiss complete insanity. Still, it is interesting how he managed to plan his crime and carry it out, but now is completely unable to mount a defense and assist counsel.

He said that he believes that his attorneys are conspiring against him. This is what is keeping him from being tried now. If they want to medicate him and then reconsider whether or not he can aid in his defense, they need another court appearance just for that.

or........Loughner, associated with right-wing extremists in AZ (ie, anti-immigration zealots also hated Ms Giffords, and the judge JL shot) may have known a bit too much. Unbalanced, twisted,deviant--yes, but mostly coherent in his few last rants. So he enacts the horrible "payback" to Ms Giffords and the "liberals" --perhaps following orders, or with unknowns involved (ie, those who helped with him getting his weapons). Inside the AZ/Fed machine, the authorities finally realize they've got a lot to lose if Jared's allowed to testify freely. So...while's inside--the Feds mix in some bad dope--tainted thorazine, whatever--with his chow. And...presto chango--he's turned into a drooling psychopath who no longer poses any danger to the AZ right-wing militias."

I'd like to see an investigation of Sheriff Dupnik who good ol' boyed this problem down the road and recently had a SWAT team murder an Iraq war vet by shooting him 60 times.

At least they hit him with 60 of the 71 rounds they fired. Which means that his wife and kid survived. Permanently scarred, never trusting the cops again, but alive.

Notably, the victim here, Jose Guereña, still had the safety his semiautomatic AR-15, which shows the difference in training between the USMC and the Tucson PD. They apparently went full rock and roll with their fully automatic machine guns (I know, redundant, but to emphasize a point), when one of them accidentally stumbled and discharged his weapon.

OH, and to add insult to injury (or actually, death to the shooting), they refused to allow the victim medical help for one hour and 14 minutes, claiming that they needed time to clear the (fairly modest) house - which they should be able to do in 4 minutes, not 74 minutes.

Pima County, AZ seems to have some serious problems with its sheriff's department.

His history and YouTube video make it clear, I think, that he is schizophrenic. Heck, you could watch 30 seconds of any of his YouTube videos and know that the guy uploading them was an untreated schizophrenic.

But it's not kindness to deprive him of the consequences of his actions.

Don't we generally take into account the cause of actions before determining consequences?

Say you have a grandfather who says horrible, terrible things to anyone who visits him. Wouldn't your reaction to this differ depending on whether he was suffering from dementia?

Or, better yet, say a baby dies of neglect in his home. Would the consequences for the mother who was supposed to be caring for him differ from the usual if it turned out that she had fallen down the stairs, been subsequently paralyzed from the neck down, and remained undiscovered until after her child had died?

What I like most (like in quotation marks) is referring to the sedatives as "medication." Ok, I'm on board with someone needing to severely calm down, but let's call them what they are: sedatives. Sedation. They are not medicines, as there is no illness.

This neural pathways stuff is nonsense. Sounds good, but it's just BS nonsense.

I'm on board with him needing more time to be competent enough to aid his own defense, but what else are they going to do to him? ECT? This stuff is BS. He needs to recover, but on the other hand, what's the difference? Obviously they are just trying to shorten the time period so they can just start making him take the meds. So then I guess the law has ruled: there is physiologically based mental illness.

Poor J. Arizona will never have gun control and gun control is basically over everywhere thanks to recent Supreme Court decisions.

If only people like you with such authoritarian impulses could control the world. Surely, there would be no mad killers (like here in Chicago, where gun control is rife, and there are no murders). And, of course, there would be no poverty.

Also, John Edwards will go to jail or pay a very, very steep fine. And I'm still waiting to hear about his plan to end poverty.

Do we take untreated schizophrenics seriously as moral beings? If your sensory input is full of hallucinations and you are incapable of reflecting in any rational way on that already damaged input, how can you be a moral being?

In fact, the modified scenario is a modification of something that happened in my life.

It wasn't a friend, but a relative of a relative. We were invited to the house, and this old man, out of nowhere, begins ranting about how bad live in the U.S. is, inserting obscenities every third word or so.

He was a Cuban immigrant, who voted Republican all his life. When dementia came, he became obscene, and began to find fault with the U.S. I wanted to respond, but a relative touched me on the arm and explained he had advanced dementia.

So, we let him rant, he eventually got tired, and we continue having our conversation. I don't think how we could have acted any other way.

Do we take untreated schizophrenics seriously as moral beings? If your sensory input is full of hallucinations and you are incapable of reflecting in any rational way on that already damaged input, how can you be a moral being?

"A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic laying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world." Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Yes you take people who have received a diagnosis of schizophrenia seriously as moral persons. Of course. If they are violent, that is another story, and that's when you start to doubt their motivations.

He probably had adult onset schizophrenia, which ran in the family...with signs at least two years ago. He drifted off day by day and his family couldn't, and wouldn't face the consequences.

And yes I'm aware of the pathetic attempt by Leftists to only understand guns, war, soldiers, acts of political etc. through the lens of psychological harm...for where else can you feel, have an unthinking reaction...and cudgel your political opponents with your righteousness and ideological predilections?

And Machos, I haven't forgetten the milking of the Giffords shooting for basest political gain and the Krugmania that ensued.

I should have been more specific. Do we take people with untreated severe schizophrenia seriously as moral beings? Have you ever talked to an untreated schizophrenic? Their reality has no correspondence to actual reality. They also have no logical or even fixed template for processing the reality that they think they perceive.

I don't know how such a person can be taken seriously as a moral being.

The cycle toward recovering often involves some "treatment" - sedatives. This period is most often extremely problematic and recovery most often happens when meds are slowly tapered off. So yes, I have talked to persons who once received a diagnosis of schizophrenia who is no longer sedated.

Oh, ok, -- because you said untreated severe schizophrenia, throwing down the label gauntlet pretty strong.

Psychotic. That's different. Lots of people can be psychotic. "Everyone has a breaking point."

So, just not sure if I can answer your question. Right off the top just as in these past discussions, I would say you need to distinguish between psychotic and the psychotic and violent. A lot of people disagree with me.

Look at John Allen Muhammad. Why was he deemed competent and received the death penalty? He killed 10 people.

I just don't know if any of us knows who was psychotic when. I don't. So I can't really say.

With someone who is psychotic and not violent, again my answer would be yes: we treat them seriously as moral beings.

Freeman Hunt, the problem is not one of morality but of efficacy. In Utopia, Loughner would have a fluffy bed with perfect meds and nurses and all that. In the real world, we must deal with people like him.

Oh, and you can be taking "medication" and still be psychotic. Psychosis is even an effect of many "medications."

If someone where having a psychotic episode in an adult algebra class at my community college and I was in that class, and that person was male, and slamming his fist down on the desk and shouting at inappropriate times, yes , I would be alarmed and would contact people and would not mind such a person being taken somewhere for my and others' protection where he could be looked at and talked to. At what point I would want someone to stick a sedative in him is unclear. The whole issue is hard to talk about because we go back and forth between talking about hypotheticals and jared Loughner.

So let's say Jared Loughner has done something but not murdered. And we are all Jared Loughner's parents.

So Jared comes home and he is more distressed and anxious and incoherent than ever, and we are his parents, something has happened, we gotta find out what and we have to help him calm down. He is going to have a heart attack or maybe hurt himself if his frustration level and anger do not subside, and fast.

A sedative would bring him some clarity probably, he could maybe breath a bit again. But is that sedative the cure all? Will it return him to "normal?" One of the interesting things I've learned from people who have received a diagnosis of mental illness is that they do not want to be like they were before, that they see this disturbance (eventually) as an opportunity as much as a pain. It's something to grow into then out of.

But it's not! Not just me. I was here, I lived through this nightmare. It smelled like terrorism from near the beginning.

Just wiki it

"Born as John Allen Williams, Muhammad joined the Nation of Islam in 1987 and later changed his surname to Muhammad.[1] Drawings by Malvo describe the murders as part of a "jihad" (Arabic for "struggle in the way of God").[2] At Muhammad's trial, the prosecutor claimed that the rampage was part of a plot to kill his ex-wife and regain custody of his children, but the judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence to support this argument.[3]

"On November 17, 2003, by verdict of his jury, Muhammad was convicted in Virginia of all four counts in the indictment against him: capital murder for the shooting of Dean H. Meyers; a second charge of capital murder under Virginia's antiterrorism statute, for homicide committed with an intent to terrorize the government or the public at large; conspiracy to commit murder; and the illegal use of a firearm. In the penalty phase of the trial, the jury after five hours of deliberation over two days unanimously recommended that Muhammad should be sentenced to death. On March 9, 2004, a Virginia judge agreed with the jury's recommendation and sentenced John Allen Muhammad to death.

"On April 22, 2005, the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed his death penalty, stating that Muhammad could be sentenced to death because the murder was part of an act of terrorism."

I was ready to dismiss J as just another crank, but he inadvertently shed some light on the question of whether Loughner is crazy or not.

You see, ever since Clinton signed the Brady Bill it has been against federal law to sell handguns to people who are seriously mentally ill. The law provided for an intrusive background check into any and all people purchasing a handgun. Loughner went through that check and passed with flying colors.

Which means he can't possibly be crazy. If he was crazy that would imply that the gun control movement and its fans in the federal government have been violating the privacy of tens of millions of Americans for no purpose at all. And, well, the idea that the federal government might be violating our rights for no reason at all? That's just crazy talk.

It seems that me that in some circumstances, "sequester" is much more important than "punish." What we want is for the Loughners of the world to be kept as far away as possible from the rest of us. As a crazy, Loughner won't get--that is, understand, much less "get"--any of that "justice meted-out" thing in any, much less all of its, various forms, no matter how, where & how etc. it's dished out to him. What we're looking for is to make sure that he doesn't get to act out on the public his violent insanity any more, ever again, full stop. That's the key thing. The rest is just details.

I agree with Freeman that people should accept that the guy really is nuts -- he's got a serious mental illness.

But considering that it is an incurable mental illness, where does that really leave us? We can't rule out a miracle treatment in the future, but at the very least the guy should be locked up until one arrives.

Do we take untreated schizophrenics seriously as moral beings? If your sensory input is full of hallucinations and you are incapable of reflecting in any rational way on that already damaged input, how can you be a moral being?

Freeman, I have a condition called synesthasia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia - I didn't realize what it was until I was 10 and I thought everyone was like that until I was made to realize by a very smart doctor after going to 23 of them that I was different. It was also starting to incapacitate me to the point that I thought I was going crazy. The sheer volume of cross over sensory overload was starting to overwhelm my still developing brain/mind. However, that didn't preclude me from not understanding what was happening. Once I realized it and was being helped to understand it and was taught techniques to control it, things got much better. I hallucinate as an overlay of all of my 5 senses every minute of every waking hour, but I know how to distinguish the differences. Should I be called crazy too if I commit a crime? I suppose I could use it as an excuse too.

My point is, is why must some form of insanity or mental illness preclude us from thinking that the rationality it takes to plan and commit a crime like what Loughner did now needs to be framed in the light that he is now incompetent to stand trial given that he did all of those things before. Secondly, why must we sit with the belief that when you are insane that killing people is the first thing to enter your mind? Thirdly, why should we tolerate this as a society?

Your schitzo argument notwithstanding, I can understand where you are coming from, but simply because you are broken in some way mentally doesn't mean that you should be absolved of the action you made deliberately based on that mental condition? Loughner murdered people in cold blood in a planned, calculated fashion, and yet we are now being told that his mental state rises to the level of not being able to stand trial because he will be incapable of understanding what is happening to him due to that mental incompetence? Did his victims understand his mental state when his bullets ripped through them too?

If he had the moral capacity to commit these crimes, then that should be the bar by which he should stand trial for them.

You can't have moral agency when you're really nuts (and not just Boomer/NewAge nuts) seems pretty clear to me.

We get it. But you're assuming that penalties for crime are solely about punishing the guilty, while ignoring their role in protecting society from people who break the law.

Ultimately it doesn't matter WHY the guy is a mass murderer. He IS a mass murderer, ergo he should be killed or locked away forever where he can't hurt anyone else. We should certainly try to cure him -- but I don't see why that ought to be our #1 priority.

I used to work in the state mental hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the 60s. In those days your family could have you committed for being crazy. Today, because of the courts, it's almost impossible. Sometimes progress does not go in a straight line.

"But you're assuming that penalties for crime are solely about punishing the guilty, while ignoring their role in protecting society from people who break the law."

I think it's a little shifted to the side from that, even.

Rather than being about the crime and who is guilty or not, I think that it's about being evil... or not. Maybe it's about valuing feeling and emotion, I'm not sure. Perhaps at some level most people feel that in order to "punish" they have to hate. Someone has to be worthy of being hated in order to justify violence in return. (Heck, maybe that's why certain sorts want to insist so much that "law and order" sorts are simply haters.)

So... if Loughner is a right-wing nut job it's easy to hate him and believe that he deserves the harshest punishment. If he's simply a nut job, well, then it's harder to hate him, and if he's actually not competent then it's *you* who are evil if you hate him.

well I don't believe in the medical model of mental illness but synethesia seems like a real deal.

For those who persist in setting up scenarios with "severe schizophrenics," you don't get it: i don't believe in labelling. It is the bleakest, most reductive thing there is. Often family members are the ones who cling the tightest to the medical model of mental illness, which is understandable, because they think a drug will solve all their problems. Once someone gets on those major sedatives, the problems begin. I am NOT talking about Jared Loughner.

To Revenant, I agree with you, but in all likelihood, JL WILL be locked away forever, so I'm not sure what you're arguing against. My point, when this all began, was that I foresaw this day and dreaded it because a violent person was not going to be tried. From the beginning I said this was about his violence and not about mental illness.

I guess that was Bryce, Ken. Family member stayed there in the 50s. He later committed suicide. He received a diagnosis of paranoid schizhophrenia. Was a doctor. They're fiddling with Bryce now.

I was mostly just responding to the general notion that people shouldn't be punished (or locked up) if the bad thing they did had any sort of explanation for it.

I think that sometimes people are reluctant to even consider "why" because they feel that it's the same thing, or will be percieved as the same thing, as looking for excuses (in order to excuse the guilty person) instead of examining reasons.

I don't think synesthesia is a mental illness, I should say. It seems to be a neurological disorder. That's what I meant by a real deal.

I don't think it means anyone's broken.

No, you are right. It isn't a mental illness. However, not knowing you have it might make you think you do considering that no one would understand what you are dealing with. It's a genetic quirk/disorder. For me, all 5 of my senses are crossed over. Some others who have it have might have only 2 crossed over.

Do I think I'm broken? No, but I was using the argument that Freeman made that schizo's should have some sort of pass to criminality because of their mental disease, which is or isn't treatable, whereas mine is hardwired and I have no choice, yet given that I have no choice in how my brain works, I don't use it as an excuse for my actions. Now, my synesthasia isn't equal to someone with schizophrenia or some sort of socio-psychotic disease clearly, but I'm in the camp that if you were crazy while committing a crime, that should be no excuse for being prosecuted for it. Why should crazy get a pass? There is no legitimate reason for it.